If you expose Home Assistant cameras to Alexa, you may have noticed that they show up in the Alexa app but do nothing on an Echo Show. "Alexa, show the porch camera" gets no picture, and there is no live view button. A change merged into Home Assistant Core on 26 October 2026 fixes that by speaking the protocol Amazon now expects. It is in the development branch, the documentation is tagged for the next release, and it should arrive with Home Assistant 2026.11.

What went wrong

Home Assistant's Alexa integration advertised cameras only with Alexa.CameraStreamController, which hands Alexa an HLS stream. According to the pull request, Amazon's devices no longer use that interface for live view, and it is no longer accepted for certification. The camera was discovered, but the Echo Show had nothing it could play.

What changes

The contribution by Saf (nolimit-labs), reviewed by Paulus Schoutsen and jbouwh, adds Alexa.RTCSessionController, the WebRTC based interface. It is offered for cameras that already support WebRTC in Home Assistant, either natively or through a provider such as go2rtc. The session is half duplex, so you get the picture and sound from the camera but no two-way talk. Cameras that met the old requirements keep CameraStreamController as well, so existing setups are not affected.

Alexa does not support trickle ICE and expects an answer within 6 seconds. Home Assistant therefore gathers connection candidates for a short time and puts them straight into its answer. Only IPv4 candidates are sent; IPv6 and mDNS ones are dropped. When Alexa ends the session, Home Assistant closes the WebRTC stream.

The author tested it on a real Echo Show with UniFi Protect cameras going through go2rtc and Home Assistant Cloud.

What you need

The updated documentation lists a few conditions:

  • The camera stream must be reachable over IPv4. A stream available only over IPv6 or a .local name will not work.
  • Video travels over your public address or through a TURN relay. Home Assistant Cloud provides a relay. Without Cloud, the public address may be enough. Otherwise, add your own TURN server in the WebRTC integration.
  • Alexa checks for WebRTC support only during discovery. If WebRTC becomes available later, for example because go2rtc started after Home Assistant, say "Alexa, discover devices" again.

If live view still fails, enable debug logging for homeassistant.components.alexa and look at the WebRTC exchange.